Star Trek: The Destiny Era: Force and Motion

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Force and Motion
by Jeffrey Lang

January 9-10, 2386 (and innumerable flashbacks)

Published: 2016
Acquired: October 2021
Read: July 2023

One of my favorite novels is Lawrence Durrell's Justine (1957), which is told not in chronological order. Rather, at one point the narrator tells us, "What I most need to do is to record experiences, not in the order in which they took place—for that is history—but in the order in which they first became significant to me." Most Star Trek books are told fairly conventionally from a structural point-of-view; they begin at the beginning and proceed to the end. Even when they jump around a bit, that tends to be pretty structured.

Force and Motion is no Lawrence Durrell novel (for that to be the case, it would have to drop all the very helpful captions and just leave the reader to sink or swim) but it's still one of those rare, refreshing Star Trek novels that seems more interested in being a novel than in being Star Trek, if that makes sense. Nog and O'Brien are visiting Robert Hooke station to meet up with O'Brien's old captain, Benjamin Maxwell of the Routledge (see TNG's "The Wounded"), who is now the station's maintenance engineer.

In the present, there's a crisis: the station exists outside of Federation space in order to enable its residents to pursue a variety of slightly unusual experiments (my favorite was the one researching quantum beekeeping with fractal honeycombs). When Nog and O'Brien arrive, one of the experiments, a living breeding ground for microorganisms, is set free, seeking out a new energy source, threatening the integrity of the station. Nog and O'Brien and Maxwell must work together to save the other researchers and contain the threat. This is fun stuff—it's hard for DS9 as a series to incorporate "strange new worlds" but this one is able to pull in a lot of strange new concepts, and it has a bit of a classic Star Trek feel to it, with clever problem-solving. (In what is always a good sign, I found myself thinking of how I would rebuild it into a Star Trek Adventures module. Fairly easily, I think.) Mother is a neat idea, the spiders are fun, and I liked who the "villain" turned out to be.

That said, I wanted a bit more depth in the present-day stuff. It sets up some strands and ideas when it comes to O'Brien and Nog that I wish had been explored a bit more than they were: Nog and O'Brien needing to make new friends on this new station, Nog's recent trauma with Active Four and older traumas like Empok Nor. These are bubbling in there, but by novel's end, aside from the fact that they had gone through a crisis together, I didn't feel like Nog and O'Brien had grown closer much.

In the past, we see snippets of Benjamin Maxwell: him days after the Setlik III massacre, him just after the events of "The Wounded," him in therapy in New Zealand, him during the Destiny trilogy, him coming home to find his mother dead, him trying to settle into a new life. But these are all out of order scattered throughout the book. And it's not just him either, there are flashbacks to O'Brien during his time on the Routledge, Nog hanging out with Jake after school, O'Brien following "The Wounded," Nog meeting up with Jake for New Year's, and more.

Whenever a novel has a weird structure, I think it's important that that structure be significant. Like, anyone can choose to tell their story out of chronological order, but what prevents it from just being a gimmick? Well, if the form of the novel intersects meaningfully with the project of the novel, then it works. The project of Justine is the narrator attempting to understand Justine but eternally being unable to do so. He writes of one of his failed novels, "In art I had failed (it suddenly occurred to me at that moment) because I did not believe in the discrete human personality. ('Are people', writes Pursewarden, 'continuously themselves, or simply over and over again so fast they give the illusion of continuous features—the temporal flicker of old silent film?') I lacked a belief in the true authenticity of people in order to successfully portray them." Hence, the book is told out of order because the narrator doesn't believe in the continuity of people.

Force and Motion is told out of order for a very different reason. Benjamin Maxwell may have been a captain, but he started his career as an engineer and he ended it as one too: his goal is to put broken things together. In this case, the broken thing is Maxwell himself—his pieces are scattered all across the novel, and as we put them back together, so does he. Maxwell is a man who wanted to fix what he found, and when he lost his own family, he couldn't put himself back together anymore. Here, he rebuilds himself, not quite as he was before, but into something that works. Given how his first attempt to do so led to him leading a deadly attack, I really liked how his second attempt to rebuild focused on the protection of life at all costs—even the lives of a band of pirates. In the end, he gets to do something he'd never done before, and he gets to protect a new life-form. I loved a lot of the snippets we saw of him across the years: him in therapy telling stories about gerbils and (somewhat surprisingly) him talking to Worf were particular highlights. I've seen some complaints there should have been fewer flashbacks, or they should have been more linear, but to be honest, if that was the case, it wouldn't be a better novel, it would be a different one. It wouldn't come together.

There are lots of thematic connections without them hitting you over the head, lots of depth to mine here. In the end, Maxwell finds some broken creatures and helps them the way he failed to do so many times before. It's a meaningful ending to a good book.

This was to be Jeff Lang's last contribution to the Star Trek line, which is a real shame, because I felt like he was developing into someone like Una McCormack, an interesting distinctive voice with real stories to tell. I sort of felt like they gave him The Light Fantastic as a sop for mining his work so heavily in Cold Equations, but if so, I'm impressed and glad he was asked back to write this.

Continuity Notes:

• In one flashback, Nog is tending bar while O'Brien and Bashir talk about the Alamo. Did Nog really keep working in the bar when he was a cadet on his field placement?
• Given the book picks up on O'Brien's arachnophobia from "Realm of Fear" it seems weird it didn't also acknowledge him having a pet spider from the same episode.
• One of the flashbacks indicates that as of when Nog and Jake were kids, Nog's mom was already dead; this contradicts Ferenginar: Satisfaction Is Not Guaranteed, where she makes an appearance.
• Unlike some other recent DS9 books, this seems to slot into its location fairly well; the flashback of Nog and Jake on New Year's is set between The Poisoned Chalice and Nog's return to the station in part 2 of Ascendance.

Other Notes:

• I hadn't realized until reading Force and Motion how similar O'Brien and Nog were in one sense—they are both great vehicles for suffering. DS9 is famous for its "O'Brien must suffer" episodes but only upon reading this book did it really dawn on me that we got a string of "Nog must suffer" episodes too: "Empok Nor," "Valiant," "The Siege of AR-558," "It's Only a Paper Moon." I guess just like O'Brien's everyman status makes him a good vehicle for suffering, so too does Nog's innocent status.
• There are lots of good flashbacks, some of which I've already mentioned. The Worf one is excellent: "It might be an honorable course of action... But I do not think he would sleep well." The best day / worst day ones were also good. Also Maxwell waiting for the Borg and frustrated he can't serve in defense of Earth. Maxwell saving a dog. I liked the two with Jake a lot, especially Jake's reflections on what happened to Sisko after Jennifer died, which has some nice but not overdone parallels to Maxwell. Nog watching O'Brien and Bashir when they beat the Alamo was good, but even better was O'Brien's present-day explanation of why that moment mattered so much.
  
• It's nice to actually have a novel that actually makes some use of O'Brien, even though he's been back on the station for some five novels now, and we get some small updates on his family. I will never believe that Miles O'Brien lived on Cardassia as long as he lived on Deep Space 9, but this book does tell us that Kirayoshi resents having to live on the station. It would be interesting to see a kid who would rather live on Reconstruction-era Cardassia than the new Deep Space 9!
• There are lots of small nice moments of character here; I particularly liked one where Maxwell notices how much in sync Nog and O'Brien are on p. 133. Nog feeling like he's not as good friends with Jake's wife as he'd prefer rings true to my experience of what happens when a long-distance friend gets married.
  
• "Do they have ships that just clean up the mess after the big ships are finished doing whatever they need to do?" Well, actually, yes! Jeff Lang got that one right many years in advance.

I read Destiny-era Star Trek books in batches of five every few months. Next up in sequence: The Next Generation: Armageddon's Arrow by Dayton Ward